Opinion: Fix the schedule, NASCAR

This year has made clear that fans want more schedule diversity and action

Share

And that’s remarkable for an industry that routinely chastises anyone with influence who suggests that anything is wrong. After all, you’re not supposed to tell the emperor he’s naked.

"The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes!"

The sport is healthier than ever before just doesn’t seem to mesh with the television numbers, dwindling in-person attendance or the perceived general malaise surrounding major league stock car racing in 2018.

And that’s not to say that NASCAR isn’t getting a lot of things right at the moment, because it is, but officials will rarely get credit for it since they have such a low batting average in general over the last two decades.

To their credit, NASCAR officials have crafted a pretty exciting championship format that balances season-long excellence with the intensity of a playoff. The muffler has been taken off the current crop of stars, making them more relatable and authentic than many of their predecessors. And based on the canvas it has to work with, NASCAR has done a good job of generating intensity within the races.

NASCAR will soon be at a crossroads, and Humpy Wheeler has an idea or two about what direction major league stock car racing should take in the coming decade.The former Charlotte Motor Speedway ...

But based on the first half of the regular season, one thing has become abundantly clear: NASCAR fans are fed up with the redundancy of the schedule across all three national tours.

It wasn’t that long ago that even writing this would draw you scorn from those in the glass offices at Daytona and Charlotte, wanting to protect the status quo of two national track conglomerates that control 93 percent of the current Cup Series schedule.

But in the past five years or so, there has been this great awakening of sorts that technology has passed many of these tracks by. That you can’t unlearn decades of mechanical and aerodynamic engineering, resulting in hit-or-miss racing, often determined by the age of a track surface.

And even at its best, like Altanta or Chicagoland this season, do we as the NASCAR community really need to see the same product 17 times out of 36 races? And even worse, did NASCAR really need to strip the old Busch Series and Truck Series of its independent identity in exchange for becoming a carbon copy of the Cup Series week in and week out?

If in the past, a column like this was met with scorn or an automatic dismissal that the politics of NASCAR made suggestions like this impossible, today’s front office has taken a "no stone unturned" approach to entertaining any suggestion that could create better racing.

While the rest of the motorsports world marveled over the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series competing on dirt at Eldora Speedway on Wednesday afternoon, Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series championship ...

"You’ve got to try things every now and again," Logano said. "You can try different packages on the car, try different race tracks, try different formats, things like that. Why not?

"You don’t know until you do it. We can talk about things and talk about doing this or that, but you don’t really know until you try it, so you might as well give it a shot."

From that standpoint, we should all be really excited for the Charlotte ROVAL, based on an eventful testing session that showed the circuit could be Martinsville but with right turns. Somehow, NASCAR, International Speedway Corporation and Speedway Motorsports Inc. are going to have to balance what’s best for their immediate interests and what’s best for the sport’s long-term appeal.

Instead of being like Texas Motor Speedway, reconfiguring a mile-and-a-half into a slightly different mile-and-a-half, Atlanta Motor Speedway should consider turning itself into a one-miler once the long-expected repave becomes necessary.

Maybe some of these nearly identical intermediate tracks need to be sacrificed in exchanged for the likes of Nashville, Iowa Speedway, Montreal's Circuit Gilles Villeneuve or Eldora in Ohio.

Now in its sixth season, the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race on the dirt at Eldora Speedway has remained a crown jewel on the motorsports calendar.It’s definitely unique as the dirt race ...

But the past six months have collectively taught us that the status quo is getting so very old.

Many will say the sport can’t afford to break up the financial conglomerates that run the show, but maybe they can’t afford not to, either.

"I think that, you know, there are really some great race tracks," Denny Hamlin said. "If you want to talk about road courses, there are some amazing tracks just north of the border in Canada that are awesome, Montreal and (Mosport), that are made for road course racing.

"The ROVAL is a little bit different of a beast because I don’t know how much architecting went into coming up with passing zones ... how blind it is in some corners, and obviously we know that attrition will be at a maximum in that type of race.

"It’s certainly a wild card race and maybe that’s what the fans want."

They don't want carnage every week, but they surely don't want the same kind of race 17 out of 36 weekends either -- frustrating because it's going to take moving a mountain to make this pipe dream a reality.

"None of this is ever going to happen," Hamlin said. "Not until these tracks and NASCAR get together and are willing to make changes. No track is going to give up tens of millions of dollars every time the race cars show up at the race track, so it’s going to have take a bold change.

"It’s going to have to take someone way high up saying, 'We’re making changes and this is what we’re going to do,' for it to happen, but it definitely won’t happen in the next few years until that contract’s over with."

It's going to take those in Daytona and Charlotte realizing they suddenly aren’t wearing any clothes.

Matt Weaver
- Matt Weaver is an associate motorsports editor at Autoweek. Before becoming a journalist, he was a dirt track racer and short track cheeseburger connoisseur.
See more by this author»